G. Boschetti, P. Gallina, G. Rosati, A. Rossi, and V. Zanotto (Italy)
Blind people, obstacle avoidance, structured environment, tracking system.
In this paper, a new obstacle avoidance system for blind people is presented. This work comes from a research project funded by the Italian National Center for Research (CNR), and has been carried out at the DIMEG mechatronics laboratory. The system is made up of an electromagnetic tracking device for blind man head pose estimation, that consists in an antenna and a little wired 6 d.o.f. position sensor, a desktop computer for data processing and an audio system. The main goal of the system is to guide the man throughout a limited known environment. Our approach consists in determining position and orientation of the blind man with respect to the environment, and hence producing a proper audio signal so as to guide him in avoiding obstacles during motion. Control scheme and system implementation are presented, together with first experimental results.
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